Module 5: Family and Community Partnerships

What Young Children Learn

Page 8

Everything children learn depends on the context provided by their families, including their environment, interactions, activities, etc. The home is the center of children’s development, and families are their first and most enduring teachers. Most of this learning doesn’t happen through direct teaching but simply by children observing his or her parents in daily life. There are four main types of learning in young children (LG Katz, 1994).

The Ecological Systems Model (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) sees the child at the center of layers of concentric circles of environmental influences. In other words, the child is first a member of a family (microsystem), which is part of a community (mesosystem), within increasingly large environmental contexts (exosystem and macrosystem). Another way to view this model is to think of them as Russian dolls that nest inside each other from largest to smallest.

The Ecological Systems Model

As you learned in Module 1, culture shapes our beliefs about what children and parents should be like, and how they should interact. Families then socialize their children according to their values. The ways in which children are viewed, touched, disciplined, taught, spoken to are all deeply influenced by families’ systems of beliefs and behaviors. These may be different from the child caregiver’s own values and beliefs but are not less valid.

Children’s feelings about themselves also originate from their families’ beliefs, which have lifelong impact on development and learning. While providers may know a lot about child development, families must be recognized as the experts on their individual child.

High quality care for children can only be achieved when families are treated with respect and acknowledged as their child’s most important teacher.

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